Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #83 Liberty's Secret (2016)
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
This column has given me an awesome opportunity to revisit movies I’ve loved through the ages, like last week’s Freeway but it has also introduced me to glorious obscurities I would never have encountered without the column, let alone watched and written about.
That’s true of the adorably naive inter-faith lesbian political musical comedy Liberty’s Secret, which was released, after a fashion, in 2016 but feels unmistakably like a period piece from a kinder, gentler era of compassionate Conservatism rather than our own bitterly divisive age.
That’s because Liberty’s Secret took eight long years to develop so what was designed as a cornball satire of Bush-era bible-thumping Conservatism was released the year a Conservative Republican and “Christian” was elected who makes W. look like the cuddliest, most open-minded and progressive of teddy bears by comparison.
#kissgate!
Liberty’s Secret faith in the fundamental goodness and open-mindedness of the American people, the political system and evangelical Christianity can’t help but seem poignantly delusional and myopic from the perspective of 2020. I want to live in the hopeful, optimistic world of Liberty’s Secret, where no obstacle or conflict is so extreme that it can’t be overcome through love, kindness, understanding and/or a song.
Cara AnnMarie leads a no-name cast as Nikki Levine, a hardened political operative and spin doctor working for Kenny Weston (John Lepard), a Presidential contender with Mitt Romney’s moderate politics and W’s aw-shucks affability and propensity for gaffes and spoonerisms.
Weston’s campaign is going nowhere until the head spin-doctor in Weston’s campaign, the film’s only real villain, stumbles upon preacher’s daughter Liberty Smith (Jaclene Wilk) in a church and senses that she’s something the world of Presidential politics has never experienced before.
Liberty is an instant game changer: an attractive young white woman who can sing and dance and smile all pretty like in a manner so preposterously irresistible that it single-handedly saves Weston’s campaign when he hires her on as a campaign surrogate.
What’s a campaign surrogate? The most obvious example that I can think of is Omarosa, whose job as a campaign surrogate for Donald Trump in 2016 was to convince African-Americans understandably aghast at Trump’s intense racism that Trump obviously couldn’t be racist if he not only knew an African-American like herself but also employed them in a cynical attempt to reach the demographic most likely to see through Trump and his evil bullshit.
In Liberty’s Secret Liberty uses her Snow White looks and perfect pink plastic princess personality to spread the message that if we elect Weston he will take our country back to a time when men were men, women were women and heterosexuality and rigid gender roles were enforced through fear and societal control.
In other words, Weston, or rather the cynical spin-doctor using him as his puppet wants to Make America Great Again and he wants to use Liberty as the wholesome, clean-cut, obviously virginal and heterosexual face, voice and image of his traditional values campaign.
In one of the many wonderfully implausible aspects of Liberty’s Secret, Weston’s campaign illustrates its fierce commitment to heterosexuality by having Liberty swan her way through an elaborate musical production number about how she’s “Looking Forward to the Good All Days” while surrounded by singing, dancing Norman Rockwellesque representations of our cozy, corny, idealized American past.
It’s four and a half minutes of musical razzle-dazzle worthy of the Freed Unit at MGM but it somehow picks up 20 million views on Youtube in a mere hour, because if there’s one thing bigots and homophobes enjoy it’s musicals.
Through the magic of almost impressively terrible green screen, the scrappy, low-budget filmmakers were able to send their star-crossed romantic leads all over the country without ever leaving the three cities in Michigan where the entire movie was filmed.
Liberty’s Secret’s green screen is so hilariously fake that I wish they’d really leaned into its artificiality and had Liberty and Nikki campaign in such places as the inside of a volcano, the surface of the moon and the human bloodstream.
That would look only slightly less realistic than Liberty’s Secret’s failed attempts to use technological trickery to make the Midwest look like Washington D.C.
Unfortunately for Weston’s family values push, Liberty has a secret. As evidenced by the “Fuck me” eyes Liberty gives Nikki the first time they meet, and every subsequent time as well, Nikki is sexually attracted to women.
After duetting in a park Liberty and Nikki share a forbidden kiss. They’re so wrapped up in their overriding passion, their l’amour fou, that they do not realize that literally, three feet away a nosy woman with a cell phone is commemorating the moment for posterity, and then sharing that tender, intimate moment with the world.
The moment is lazily dubbed “Kiss-Gate.” As scandals go, a woman kissing another woman in 2016 is maybe ten times bigger than Watergate. We’re informed Weston’s religious conservative base is aghast at the kiss and that the Democrats are angry at Liberty for what they refer to as “Flip-Flopping.”
Now I would like to think that if Trump surrogates Diamond and Silk were photographed smooching lustily Trump supporters would go out of their way to pretend to be supportive because that would mean Trump had high-profile supporters who are black AND gay when the president is rightly unpopular with those groups on account of being a bigoted, racist, hateful monster.
The idea that Democrats would be angry that a Conservative icon is gay because it shows that she couldn’t decide whether she’s straight or gay and consequently is flip-flopping in her sexual preference is absurd but the political world of Liberty’s Secret bears only a vague resemblance to our own.
Liberty’s preacher father sends her to Gay Conversion Therapy, where a very flamboyant gentleman expresses his ideas about the importance of enforcing rigid gender stereotypes through the most famously heterosexual vehicle imaginable: an elaborate song and dance number with lyrics like “Why the girls like symphonies/And quilting bees and pretty please/And meeting girlfriends at the mall/But most of all girls like boys/And boys like hockey pucks/and pickup trucks/and 12-point bucks/And getting drunk with the guys/So it’s no surprise/Most of all, boys like girls!”
In Liberty’s Secret, however, girls like girls as more than just friends and in a gloriously unrealistic development, everyone ultimately turns out to be cool with that, even the preacher who sent his daughter to Gay Conversion Therapy to cure her of her natural urges.
Like a Shakespearean comedy with considerably worse writing and slightly weaker characters, Liberty’s Secret ends not just at a wedding but a gay wedding where Republican and Democrat, Christian and Jew, Black and White all come together to celebrate what really matters in life: love and embracing your truth.
In a typically inclusive touch, Liberty’s Secret ends with the implication that Liberty’s widowed white father might just end up getting hitched to an African-American atheist, clearly setting up an inevitable sequel that has not happened quite yet.
“Naive” does not do justice to Liberty’s Secret’s child-like conception of romance and politics and our ever-increasing cultural divide. It’s downright Pollyannaish in its unshakeable belief that people are fundamentally good and not evil sheep being led mindlessly to the slaughter.
As a musical, Liberty’s Secret suggests what might happen if the folks behind Capitol Steps decide to write a musical of original songs that nevertheless retain the same level of glibness as their usual work.
Is Liberty’s Secret a good movie? Oh god no. But I thoroughly enjoyed every minute of it because it is so astonishingly stupid and silly but also extraordinarily sweet. So if you are at all curious about it give it a chance. You might be laughing at it more than with it, but chances are good you’ll chuckle all the same and maybe learn something while you’re at it about acceptance and tolerance that, to be fair, you’re already going to know going in.
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